WASHINGTON — Silicon Valley data-integration company Palantir, which has thus far let others do the talking in the fight over the US Army's planned intelligence software suite against the company's own product, is putting itself directly into the center of the fray.
The company is breaking its relative silence and has decided to file a protest in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims after losing a case last month that it filed with the Government Accountability Office over the Army's acquisition plans for the second increment of its Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A).
According to a letter of intent sent to US Army Contracting Command on June 16 from the law firm representing Palantir in the case — Boies, Schiller & Flexner, LLP, in Washington — a protest will be filed within "approximately the next week."
The company is aiming for a preliminary injunction, which, if granted by a judge, would require the Army to stop efforts within the program, including awarding a contract for DCGS-A Increment 2.
In the letter, Palantir's lawyers call the Army's acquisition efforts for DCGS-A Increment 1 and Increment 2 both illegal and irrational.
The controversy over whether the Army should scrap its DCGS-A program after spending more than a decade and $3 billion to develop it or go with a commercial off-the-shelf solution has been simmering for years. Soldiers, in Afghanistan particularly, have repeatedly requested permission to use Palantir instead of using DCGS-A, as the service continues to work out glitches and problems with its own program.
The letter of intent says that half of the Army brigades have asked urgently for Palantir because of too many problems with DCGS-A in the field and at home station.
"Instead of embracing feedback from the war fighter, the Army bureaucracy continues to defend its own failing system while blocking or delaying access to Palantir's proven technology," the letter stated.
In its GAO protest, Palantir argued that the way the Army wrote its requirements in a request for proposals to industry would shut out Silicon Valley companies that provide commercially available products. The company contended that the Army's plan to award just one contract to a lead systems integrator means commercially available solutions would have to be excluded, according to an industry lobbyist familiar with the issue.
"This lawsuit is necessary because the Army's solicitation restricts competition to 'cost-plus' bids from contractors in order to build a data management platform on top of a previous failed effort to do so," the letter of intent said.
The Army's solicitation, released in December 2015, sought bids to develop a data management platform for DCGS-A Inc. 2. The Army said it was seeking a lead integrator to create a framework that could gather data from numerous sources with a common data layer, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to-use visualization of the framework for soldiers to use in the field.
The letter claims that Palantir's "Gotham Platform" meets those needs and already provides the services to part of the Army and other military components for a fraction of the cost of DCGS-A. US Special Operations Command, for example, recently minted a new deal to use Palantir, and the US Marine Corps is a customer as well.
Palantir's move to protest the acquisition process of the Army's DCGS-A program gets at the heart of a deeper struggle within the military to figure out how to buy commercial technologies and work with a business sector nearly alien to the way the Defense Department is used to developing and procuring systems. Defense Secretary Ash Carter is aggressively courting the California tech world, but some in the defense industry and within the Pentagon are skeptical such relationships can work.
And over the past several years, more and more legislation requires the Defense Department to use commercial products when reasonable.
In some instances — as is the case with DCGS-A — cooperating more tightly with Silicon Valley would require a major cultural shift away from internal development, something the Pentagon has had a hard time letting go.
"In a larger sense, this solicitation is a prime example of the Army's reluctance to adopt commercial innovation and instead defend repeated attempts to reinvent technologies from scratch," the letter of intent stated, adding: "This approach is unlawful, irrational, arbitrary and capricious."
A lawsuit in federal court could also bring answers to other open questions related to the dispute. For example, the Army likely will have to argue why it did not immediately provide Palantir to soldiers requesting it in the field on previous occasions. It will also have to explain what DCGS-A does and why a commercial product can't replace it in full, something the service has struggled over the years to make clear. None of the issues could be addressed in the context of a GAO protest.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., has been fighting for some of these answers for many years, even sparring with then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno in a hearing over the issue.
Duncan's chief of staff, Joe Kasper, told Defense News Monday, "The Army has been trying to build Palantir for years and Palantir — as a company — is right to respond this way . . . If it takes a court to get soldiers what they need, then that's what it'll take. It just needs to happen one way or another."
Email: jjudson@defensenews.com
Twitter: @JenJudson
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
